A seminar for all students in the Linguistics M.A. program. Its objectives are: orientation to the program, its faculty and the larger University; development of professional and scholarly skills; and increased familiarity with various linguistic methodologies. It encompasses four kinds of classes. There are orientation classes to make students aware of the resources available to them across the campus: e.g., libraries, databases, writing tutors. There will also be talks by faculty members, both to make students aware of the kind of research being done at Western, and to help them identify a potential supervisor for their Research Paper. These talks will also afford a survey of numerous research methodologies within linguistics. There will be workshop classes on professional skills such as: creating and maintaining an academic CV; drafting grant proposals and ethics protocols; compiling and formatting a bibliography; preparing abstracts and posters; applying to doctoral or professional programs; etc. Finally, second year students will be given an opportunity to practice presenting their work to a scholarly audience – whether it be a draft of their prospectus, a paper to be submitted for a conference, or what-have-you. Half course; one term.

Our overall goal is to examine phonological phenomena using methods from experimental phonetics, introduce you to important theoretical innovations and debates, and to strengthen your skills in instrumental and modeling techniques related to the study of sound structure. We will explore topics in speech production, acoustics, and perception centered on the broad theme of variation. These topics will be illustrated with experimental studies in sound variation and first and second language acquisition.

Linguistics courses offered in other departments:

This course provides critical assessment of linguistically complex electronic environments and roles of multilingual resources putting emphasis on linguistic, societal, and technological issues in the global information access context. Best multilingual and cross-lingual practices (e.g., cross-language information retrieval, language identification, and machine translation) as well as resources (e.g., dictionaries and corpora) are revisited. In the context of global information production and usage, most users (especially, ethnocentric monolinguals) can benefit from an in-depth understanding of linguistic and socio-cultural issues associated with multilingual digital archives as well as insights into previously proposed technological solutions for multilingual information access (MLIA).

This course will familiarize students with fundamental issues and controversies inthe areas of language and concepts, especially from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Of interest are the broad classes of models and theories of language and concept processing, and how these can be investigated using experimental data in areas such as perception, phonology, morphology, syntactic processing, semantics, working memory, first- and second-language learning, neurological disorders and neuroimaging. Half course (0.5); one term.

WINTER 2017

This is a graduate level introductory computational linguistics course. Computational linguistics models human language from a computational perspective using statistical and/or rule-based techniques. Natural language processing has a significant overlap with computational linguistics and for our purposes, I won't differentiate the two terms. The course will look at 4 main aspects of computational linguistics: 1) the word, 2) the sentence, 3) discourse, and 4) applications. The section on the word will be used to introduce regular languages (type 3 in the Chomsky hierarchy) and regular expressions and their computational models: Finite State Automata and Finite State Transducers, morphology, POS tagging, n-grams, Hidden Markov Models, and lexical semantics. The sentence component introduces context-free languages (type 2 in the Chomsky hierarchy) and context-free grammars and parsers, and compositional semantics. The unit on Discourse takes a short look at discourse segmentation, coherence, and anaphora. An introduction to some important application areas will end the course. As well as broad areas of application, we will be interested in looking at and using some well-developed tools: NLTK, Gate, FSM. Every participant in the course will do an individual research project, write a paper describing the project, and give a short presentation on the project.

Students elicit and record linguistic data from a native speaker of a designated language and then study its phonological and lexical-grammatical systems. Selected aspects of the language are analyzed in terms of current problems in linguistic theory. Half course (0.5); one term

This course will examine the main issues in second language acquisition within a generative framework, including the initial state, the role of the first language, the role of input, variability in second language grammars and ultimate attainment. It will touch on the major theoretical debates regarding the explanation for differences between L2interlanguages and the target language. We will focus particularly on research on the acquisition of French, English and Spanish, although other languages will also be included. The course will be taught in English. It is advisable that students should have taken or be taking a course on generative syntax. The course is taught twice a week (2x1 1/2 hours).

The course will examine the sociocultural construction of identity through linguistic practices and linguistic features. We will explore how individuals and groups are marked as certain kinds of people by the way they speak in a given context and how speakers use language in different ways to accomplish particular kinds of interactional goals. We may also look at how media and political discourses construct identities and relations among social groups.

This course explores a specific case of argument alternation, the causative alternation, seen with the contrast between the door opens and John opens the door. In the causative alternation, the entity denoted by the NP in subject position of the intransitive use of the verb open, the door, appears in the object position of the transitive use of same verb; the NP in subject position then denotes an entity that is understood as being responsible for the coming about of the state of affairs described by the sentence. In the course, we’ll try to establish under which circumstances this alternation is possible by comparing related classes of verbs of motions in English and English, which show different behaviors with respect to this alternation. This discussion will allow us to present different hypotheses proposed to account for this alternation, and to evaluate whether these hypothesis can provide an account for the difference discussed between English and French.

Linguistics courses offered in other departments:

Theory and practice in indexing and in constructing subject retrieval languages in thesaurus form. Distinguishing between controlled and natural language indexing, and between subject headings and index terms. Applying facet analysis to thesaurus construction. Selected topics in the theory of subject analysis. A new significant component of the course will overview current metadata and linked data initiatives and discuss how various metadata standards support subject access.

This course looks at sociolinguistic issues that are central to second language learning and teaching. It examines factors such as language attitudes and motivations, variations in language, language policies and their applications to TESOL.